We’re back in the January swing, which means another stellar round-up of the best digital marketing stats to grace the interweb this week. It includes news about grocery sales, failed deliveries, email performance, and so much more.

Today’s consumers are more connected than ever before - constantly checking emails, social media apps, and even interacting online via voice technology.

For brands, the challenge is to cut through the noise to be able to reach consumers at the right time. This is where cross-channel marketing comes in: an approach that allows brands to seamlessly communicate with consumers across multiple touchpoints.

Personalisation is massive. We see it more and more in digital marketing and it's partly what machine learning technology will be tasked with in 2018.

But automated personalisation isn't always a good thing. If it isn't implemented sensitively it can jar. Nobody likes to feel like they are in some giant sausage making machine, or being served by a slightly sinister robot butler.

All retailers - from huge multinationals to the independent - face the same dilemna. Why do online shoppers abandon their baskets, and what can they do to improve?

Dropped baskets can happen at any stage of the customer journey, and can be due to a range of reasons, from a poorly designed website to a lack of fulfilment options. But it’s even more frustrating when this happens at the final hurdle, when customers are clicks away from getting through to the confirmation page.